Neste commissions a new upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic (LWP) at its Porvoo refinery in Finland. This EUR 111 million investment is a major milestone in the scale-up of chemical recycling, resulting in the production of high-quality feedstock for the plastics and chemicals industry. The facility will boast an annual capacity to process up to 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic.
Neste
Neste commissions upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic
“The successful commissioning proves that we can process liquefied waste plastic at an industrial scale,” said Jori Sahlsten, Executive Vice President of Oil Products at Neste. “This achievement demonstrates Neste's capability to develop advanced technology, set safety standards, and create new supply chains for challenging new raw materials. We are proud of this achievement, and I want to express my sincere thanks to our partners and employees whose dedication has allowed us to turn this vision into a reality.”
The new facility allows Neste to minimise the quality gap between crude liquefied plastic waste and the high-quality drop-in raw materials the petrochemical industry requires. Mechanical recycling is often limited by the quality of the waste. Neste’s new facility is specifically designed to process oils derived from challenging waste plastic streams like multi-layer packaging, mixed plastic waste, and contaminated plastics.
Maiju Helin, Director of Polymers and Chemicals at Neste, added, “We enable the scale-up of chemical recycling by upgrading liquefied plastic waste. The plastic originates from low-quality waste streams not suitable for mechanical recycling and destined for incineration or landfills. Thanks to our new facility, even hard-to-recycle plastic waste can be upgraded to meet the feedstock quality requirements of companies manufacturing high-quality plastics. However, the current European Commission’s calculation rules on recycled content in the Single Use Plastics Directive threaten to limit the ability of refineries to serve the EU’s recycled content targets. For Europe's competitiveness sake, we need to ensure the calculation rules are amended to include refineries in the context of the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation.”
The new facility upgrades liquefied waste plastic, which is then co-processed with fossil products in the refinery. A mass balance approach is applied to attribute the recycled raw materials used in the process to the recycled Neste RE product. Utilising recycled Neste RE will result in a reduction of over 70% in virgin fossil resource consumption (abiotic depletion) and a reduction of over 35% in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, when plastic waste is chemically recycled instead of incinerated and then used to replace fossil feedstock in plastics manufacturing.